    
|
|
14th December 2003 | Draft
Global Strategic Implications of the "Unsaid"From myth-making towards a "wisdom society"- / - The Varieties
of the "unsaid" in sustaining psycho-social community (and
References)
are presented separately as an Annex
Introduction IntroductionThe increasingly globalized communication society is paradoxically characterized by an increasing number of topics on which little or nothing may be publicly said. Whilst many of these "zones of the unsaid" have existed in the past, their existence becomes all the more felt in an information-rich environment. They might be compared with the astronomical "black holes" which populate the galaxies. The concern here is at what point an increase in the number of "zones of the unsaid" may completely undermine conventional hopes for global policy-making, world governance, and the implementation of strategic initiatives in response to global crises. This concern builds on the experience of the author in profiling some 59,000 world problems (in the Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential, 1995) -- as perceived by the network of 63,000 international organizations (identified in the Yearbook of International Organizations, 2003). Many of these problems have also been considered unmentionable in the past -- and may continue to remain so. Note that those considered unmentionable by one constituency may not be so for another. The following text comprises three sections. The first offers some examples of the "unsaid". The second discusses possible opportunities for navigating a strategic-space with a relatively high density of the "unsaid" -- and the circumvention of its dysfunctional effects in a knowledge-based society. This is seen as the basis for transforming a society grounded on myth-making through the media into a "wisdom society". The annex provides clues to further reflection in the light of extensive web resources on the variety of forms of the "unsaid". The contextual challenge for a "knowledge society" has been articulated in an earlier paper (Coherent Policy-making Beyond the Information Barrier, 1999) based on an earlier exploration of Development beyond Science to Wisdom: Facilitating the emergence of configurative understanding in Councils of the Wise (1979). A. Examples of the "unsaid"
B. Encompassing the "unsaid"Regression to a mindset of mythMythical consciousness in the past: One approach to the "unsaid" takes the form of regression to an earlier stage of human psycho-cultural history oriented to respond to diffuse and ill-formed threat. In that period the environment was believed to be densely populated with hostile, and possibly malignant, spirits and others forces articulated through myth. Such forces were primarily responsible for accidents, illness and death -- and terror of every kind. Some populations around the world remain in thrall to such beliefs -- and the need to assuage the hostile spirits and counter their efficacy. This is notably the case of those in the animist tradition and of their voodoo successors. Those thriving in this environment succeeded in part through their capacity to embody the forces in credible mythical stories -- offering great explanatory power -- and to inspire fear in those who thwarted them, or in any way doubted their credibility. These powerful people are partly recognized as witchdoctors. They claim the ability to commune with the spirit world and to divine the intentions of its inhabitants. Culturally, the possibility of magical intervention in governance continues to be celebrated through the involvement of Merlin in the Arthurian myth -- with its associated positive and negative dimensions. In the past century, aspects of this pagan world view were deliberately cultivated by the Nazi leadership using magical and esoteric practices. Indeed many features of the Nazi Party are considered to have been driven by this perspective including the orchestration of the mass rallies by Albert Speer. Not since Augustus Caesar had there been such a total orchestration of technology, media, art and music for political purposes. Hitler himself was a member of the secret Thule Society. [more | more]. Efforts have been made to distinguish between "black magic" in contrast with the "white magic" that many hope would prevail. For example current interest in shamanism focuses on its beneficial role, notably in healing. But there are continuing concerns, notably amongst conspiracy theorists, at "satanic" influence in government [more]. "Satan" is a descriptor used both by "jihadis" and "crusaders" against each other. Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin, US deputy undersecretary of defence for intelligence (responsible for tracking down key leaders of al-Qaeda) has said publicly in 2003 that he sees the war on terrorism as a clash between Judeo-Christian values and Satan -- has been defended by the White House for doing so [more | more | more | more]. Fear-mongering as a basis for power: There is a case for reflecting on the position acquired and cultivated by George Bush and Tony Blair in relation to the above patterns. Both are highly focused on promoting a sense of fear in society as a means of ensuring that their populations, and the world community, continue to follow their leadership. George Bush, for example, has launched his 2004 election campaign stressing fear of terrorism -- keeping US citizens terrified is a key componenent of the re-election campaign (see Maureen Dowd. A Cold, Clammy Hand (Guardian, 25 November 2003). She notes that James Goody and Kenneth Weisbrode (Financial Times, November 2003) argue: "Fear has been used as a basis for curtailing freedom of expression and for questioning legal rights long taken for granted." (see also Promoting a Singular Global Threat -- Terrorism: Strategy of choice for world governance, 2002) Similarly, Tony Blair is intent on taking every advantage of the attack against the British Consulate in Istanbul (20 November 2003) to justify reinforcement of every possible security measure in the UK through a new civil contingencies law (updating the Emergency Powers Acts of 1920s and 1940s) -- irrespective of any human rights considerations (and in contravention of European conventions) and the inadequacy of safeguards against misuse of such powers [more]. Unproven chains of evidence: But, in both cases, as with the witchdoctors, the chains of evidence substantiating their stories about "al-Qaida terrorists" are never exposed to public scrutiny, criticism or independent evaluation. And this is despite their false claims, based on secret evidence, regarding the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and links between "Saddam Hussein" and "al-Qaida" -- on which they both requested the trust of their populations. Doubters are offered as evidence further bombings and horrendous loss of life -- but no hard evidence of the role of "al-Qaida", "Osama bin Laden" or "Saddam Hussein" is offered for public scrutiny. Under the circumstances, the justification in terms of "reasons of national security" bears an uncanny resemblance to the disputed reasons offered by witchdoctors and psychics whose claims fail to stand up to rigorous scrutiny by scientifically trained sceptics. It was the rational era that sought verifiable chains of cause and effect that diminished the credibility of the stories of witchdoctors and their fearsome hold on their populations. Whether it was a case of witchdoctors manipulating their own gullible agents to act on their behalf, skilled use of "special effects" and sleight of hand, or verbal manipulation of their audiences through charisma and "shock and awe" -- in the final analysis the zones of influence of witchdoctors were severely reduced. The powerful world of the spirits, with its terrifying inhabitants, was neutralized in the "civilized world". George Bush and Tony Blair continue to claim to be receiving strong messages concerning the shadowy invisible world of terrorists that are bent on annihilating that civilized world. But it is most curious that it is their own professional intelligence agencies who have expressed most doubt concerning the interpretation made by the White House and Downing Street of the information received. As affirmed by Ray McGovern, co-founder of the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (USA): "No President has lied so baldly and so often and so demonstrably"(Independent on Sunday, 9 November 2003). Re-activating the mythical past: To what extent then is it Bush and Blair themselves, through their private fears, who are seeking to draw the world community back into a pre-rational state of permanent fear -- in order to preserve their respective power bases? As deeply believing Christians, it is a supreme irony that they should feel most comfortable in assiduously cultivating a pre-rational mindset which Christian missionaries did much to neutralize over past centuries. On the other hand, as some argue, is it precisely their desire to force the world to act out the biblical "End Times" and Apocalyptic scenarios of the final battle of Good vs Evil that is the evangelical Christian hope for closure in the near future? It is indeed the case that Bush and Blair are very close to those who seek to activate this scenario. It is of course a travesty of that story, and an indication of the depths of the fundamental unbelief of the "good guys", that the "bad guys" in the drama -- "Saddam Hussein" and "Osama bin Laden" -- had to be secretly promoted and funded (if not trained) as agents of the USA. This is in no way to deny the existence of groups -- such as "al-Qaida" -- hostile to the Christian agenda as articulated by Bush and Blair, whether or not the evidence for their significance is more substantive than that for the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.. As the saying goes, "being paranoid does not mean that no one is really out to get you". But reactivating fear of a "bogeyman" in every public place and in every form of public transportation, is simply to reignite the fears of earliest childhood -- notably as practiced by the cruelest of parents who enjoy terrorizing the vulnerable. It is a symptom of personal insecurity in leaders (for whom "help" might tactfully be sought). It is not an act of maturity and bears no relation to values upheld by Christians. Or is it the case that the kind of Christianity they represent desperately needs Evil -- and ever more of it -- to sustain its self-esteem and sense of righteousness? It is unfortunate that the youth called upon to fight against Evil in Iraq have had it defined for them by a continuing diet of Buffy the Vampire Slayer -- that justifies their righteous lack of compunction in slaughtering civilians. For those leading them, Evil was previously defined for them by the archetypal "bad guys" from the cowboy "bad lands" of the West. The challenge of "terrorism" -- as a symptom of systematic neglect and marginalization, and a failure of dialogue -- calls for subtler approaches worthy of the most mature achievements of humanity (see Transforming the Encounter with Terrorism, 2002). IncommunicabilityThe mathematician Ron Atkin has addressed the issue of formally analyzing incommunicability in social contexts (1972, 1974, 1976, 1977) -- most accessibly in Multidimensional man: Can man live in 3-dimensional space? (1981). The relevance of these insights to an understanding of the psychology of operating in complex communication spaces, with much that is "unsaid", is given separately (see Comprehension: social organization determined by incommunicability of insights) Negative capabilityThe poet John Keats articulated (in 1817) the concept of negative capability: "being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason". Robert French ('Negative Capability', 'Dispersal' and the Containment of Emotion) explains it in psychoanalytic terms as the quality of attention as:
Global strategic implicationsCoherent governance: At what stage does the coherence of the strategic and planning process of international, national and regional governance become critically lacking in credibility to those whose support is required? This stage might be termed the "Emperor's New Clothes Threshold". Up to that point there is sufficient coherence to governance to sustain the credibility of an ideological line. Beyond it, the number of "zones of the unsaid" is so great that their overlap and fusion results in irreversible fragmentation of the social fabric and the processes of governance. The coherence of globality is lost -- there are too many holes, of too great a size, in the block of "gruyère" to sustain its integrity (see . Distant, and longer-term, perspectives become impossible. In astronomical terms again, the "dark matter" obscures the healthy viable processes. The "Dark Riders" are free to roam (see The "Dark Riders" of Social Change: a challenge for any Fellowship of the Ring. 2002). Engendering authenticity: As argued elsewhere, Bush and Blair are to be praised for having given credibility to "regime change" -- even though they fail to recognize where it is needed most (see Crusading from Washing-Town to Bag-Dad: Pre-emptive regime change as the key to sustainable development, 2002). Like the suicide bombers, they might also be praised for having shifted the debate of the international community from decades of arid futility to a focus on existential and transcendental values -- even though their actions (as in Guantanamo Bay) belie their rhetoric. This focus will indeed give expression to some of the organic immediacy of the neglected mythic consciousness -- but without a need for bogeymen and evil spirits. The irresponsibility and duplicity of their initiatives have indeed served to evoke an unprecedented degree of authenticity amongst thinking people worldwide (see Evoking Authenticity: through polyhedral global configuration of local paradoxes, 2003), heralding the emergence of a new humanity (see Authentic Grokking: Emergence of Homo conjugens, 2003). It is this which will provide the catalyst and template for a new style of global policy-making (see Coherent Policy-making Beyond the Information Barrier, 1999) inherently capable of discerning non-sequiturs in specious arguments and faulty chains of reasoning. Reframing hegemony: The question is how is their disastrous hegemonic strategic initiative to be successfully reframed -- given the level of denial promoted by the world's only superpower (see also Strategic denial: reframing the unknown). For a surrealist inspired by the tale of the Emperor's New Clothes, the current imperial mindset would preferably be reframed and dissipated as the first genuinely global joke. However, in the light of the highest insights of such as a Sufi or a master of eastern martial arts, the art may be to benefit from the engendered global mindset and frame it otherwise. By reintroducing a mythic dimension, the tendency to over-design and over-explicate a global strategy according to the sterile -- and unfruitful -- rational models of past decades may be avoided. The "unsaid" may thus be appropriately positioned at the centre of global strategic thinking -- rectifying the unfortunate effort to focus such thinking on a distorted exclusivist understanding of Christian values. Configuring around the "unsaid": The coherence of the complementary global strategic initiatives of the future may then derive from their configuration in relation to the "unsaid". The functionality is admirably illustrated by an image from a classical Taoist poem:
Given the explicit importance of such poetry to the governance of the vast Chinese empires of the past, and the value of poetry to many western statesmen of recent centuries, there is a case for exploring the value of such insights to strategic thinking (see Poetry-making and Policy-making: Arranging a Marriage between Beauty and the Beast, 1993) in providing a new grounding for such strategic thinking (see Enhancing the Quality of Knowing through Integration of East-West metaphors, 2000). A global approach, centred more insighttfully on the "unsayable", would then create a new framework to sustain the dialogue between those of radically different perspective -- the missing dialogue that is now being transformed into frustrated acts of indiscriminate suicidal violence and its indiscriminate violent suppression. This calls for recognition of a neglected understanding of "global" -- too easily framed in terms of movement of goods and services (see Future Generation through Global Conversation: in quest of collective well-being through conversation in the present moment, 1997). Governance through metaphor: This further suggests that reflection on governance of the future "information society", or "knowledge society" -- supported by the future semantic web -- might fruitfully be framed in terms of enhancing the movement of meaning through metaphor. As discussed elsewhere, with respect to "governance through metaphor", governance then becomes fundamentally the process of ensuring the emergence and movement of such "guiding" metaphor-models through an information society, as well as their embodiment in organizational form (see Governance through enhancing the movement of meaning; and Being Other Wise Clues to the dynamics of a meaningfully sustainable lifestyle, 1998). For Philippe Quéau (Growing the Global Good, 1998) as Director of UNESCO's Information and Informatics Division:
Towards a "wisdom society": The contrast of such concerns with the current framing of the issues of the "information society" and e-governance as a transformation of the service model (see UN World Summit on the Information Society, 2003) -- even when extended to the development of collaborative knowledge-based or collective intelligence processes -- suggests the need to reflect on the nature of wisdom essential to governance, and the emergence of a "wisdom society". This has been variously envisaged by bodies such as the Institute of Noetic Sciences, the Co-Intelligence Institute, George Pór's Community Intelligence, or the Fetzer Collective Wisdom Initiative:
For Simon Longstaff (Wisdom-based Organisations, Australian Business Magazine, January 1995)
It took the poet T.S. Eliot (The Rock) to pose the question:
How indeed is the interface between "wisdom", "knowledge" and "information" to be ensured in a computer-enhanced environment (see Development beyond Science to Wisdom: Facilitating the emergence of configurative understanding in Councils of the Wise, 1979; Gene Bellinger, et al. Data, Information, Knowledge, and Wisdom) when vital distinctions are easily lost in the new enthusiasm for "knowledge management" and its commercial possibilities [more | more | more | more]. Ironically it would appear that the US Air Force has focused most attentively on an understanding of that interface in the study by the Air Force University ( Air Force 2025) -- perhaps to be be more wisely understood in the light of Iraq. But perhaps the supreme irony lies in the fact that WisdomTM is a trade mark of Arthur Andersen (see Modelling knowledge with WisdomTM, 1999; more) for a "knowledge modelling" tool that was applied in the EU ESPRIT (Information Technologies Programme) project KARE (Knowledge Acquisition and sharing for Requirements Engineering) completed in 2001 -- although clearly such tools were not sufficient to provide the "wisdom" to prevent Arthur Andersen from being implicated in the Enron accounting scandal of 2002, and duly convicted [more | more]. Financial subterfuge, although an example of the "unsaid" in knowledge management, is clearly not an example of wisdom. Just as the "information society" is needed to undergird the "knowledge society", it is the latter that will provide the foundation for the processes of a "wisdom society" through which the challenges and dilemmas of global governance can be wisely handled. The assumption that the "wisdom free" processes envisaged for an "information society" (or for a "knowledge society") are adequate to the challenge of global governance have been totally undermined by the disastrous information and knowledge handling associated with governmental policies in response to Iraq. A study of the European Parliament's Directorate General for Research only comments in passing on whether the information society can be transformed into a wisdom society (Cultural Diversity and the Information Society Policy Options and Technological Issues Final Study, 2001). But, given that "information society" and "knowledge society" are increasingly in use as code to disguise narrowly focused agendas of particular vested interests, any preoccupation with "wisdom society" should embody processes which correct for tendencies to coopt the vision in the service of restrictive, self-serving agendas -- however well-meaning. As with efforts to displace "information society" by hyped-up visions of a "knowledge society" on international agendas, it becomes apparent that through such conflation each quickly tends to mean less than the aspirations and vision of what people would want to project onto them.
It is perhaps worth distinguishing some flavours of "wisdom" as in the table above -- identifying the constraints on enhancing access to each variety through computer-mediated communication:
The classic aphorism-type wisdom that points to the essence of the challenge of reflection on any "wisdom society" -- | ||||||||||||